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Oklahoma
City Reviews |
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Eagles' latest single examines life after 9/11 |
Don Henley still sings of girls in flatbed Fords and
the "crazy old nights" of California youth, but he's
not as peaceful and easy-feeling about things as he
seemed to be 31 years ago.
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In concert
Who: Eagles.
When: 8 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Ford Center, 100 W Reno.
Tickets: $125, $75, $40 (plus applicable fees) at
(800) 511-1552, Homeland stores or www.tickets.com.
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That was when he first soared up the charts with the
Eagles on the wings of such high-flying,
harmony-laden, countrified rockers as "Take It Easy,"
"Witchy Woman" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling."
Then a growing social awareness and a cynicism born of
too many years in the cutthroat West Coast music fray
gave way to edgier songs such as "Hotel California,"
"Life in the Fast Lane" and "The Last Resort."
When the Eagles crashed under the weight of stardom
and all it entails in 1981, that dark and troubled,
sometimes angry strain continued to thread through
Henley's highly successful solo career with tunes such
as his anti-media rant, "Dirty Laundry," and a sad
beauty of an album with a title that said it all --
"The End of the Innocence."
Now the Eagles, reunited since 1994, are on tour and
on the charts again, with their first new studio
recording in nine years, "Hole in the World," a ballad
which bemoans a "cloud of fear and sorrow" hanging
over the global community since the tragedies of 9/11.
"I watch the news a lot," Henley said this week in a
phone interview from a Houston hotel room. "I'm a news
junkie. We keep the TV going all the time, and, I
don't know, I was just very affected by it (9/11), and
I sat down one night at the piano, and it just came
out, or the first part of it, anyway.
"And then Glenn Frey finished it up. He and I sat
down, I think, almost a year later and finished it."
In fact, drummer/vocalist Henley,
guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Frey, bassist/ vocalist
Timothy B. Schmit and guitarist/ keyboardist/vocalist
Joe Walsh have been hard at work for two years on a
batch of other songs that will eventually comprise the
first full Eagles studio album since 1979's "The Long
Run."
But writing and recording a whole album of new tunes
isn't the six-month snap that it used to be.
"In the old days, when we were in our 20s, our lives
were our own," he recalled. "And when we would start
an album, Glenn and I would just rent a house together
and just get up in the morning and start drinking
coffee and smokin' cigarettes and just write songs all
day with no distractions. You know, watch a little
sports on TV, have a few beers in the afternoon and
then go out at night and have dinner and then come
home and write some more.
"But life isn't like that now."
Now, all four Eagles have wives and children. When the
1994 Northridge earthquake destroyed his Los Angeles
home, Henley, who had grown up in the small West Texas
town of Linden, moved back to his home state with
then-fiancee Sharon Summerall.
"We decided to get the hell out of there for two
reasons -- we didn't want to be in any more
earthquakes, and we wanted to have children, and we
wanted them to grow up in Texas, near their
grandparents and aunts and uncles, and around people
who say please and thank you and appreciate it. It's
not quite like that in California."
The couple, now eight years married, live in Dallas
with their three kids, two girls and a boy, ages 3, 5
and 7. Henley lives 1,500 miles from his bandmates and
has had to commute to recording sessions in Los
Angeles.
"Not every day, of course," Henley said. "Some people
have to play golf, and some people have to save trees
and lakes and rivers."
Henley is the one doing the Earth-saving. He spent
much of the '90s raising money for Walden Woods and
the Henry David Thoreau Institute in Concord, Mass. --
environmental education projects inspired by the
writings of Thoreau, one of Henley's favorite authors.
He has also been active in the preservation of redwood
trees in California and championed the passage of
clean-water legislation in that state.
His other causes have included battling for the
intellectual property rights of musicians and
songwriters and against the corporatization of radio
and television.
"I'm not swayed by pundits or by talk-show hosts, some
of the hate-mongers and fear- mongers that you hear on
the radio these days," Henley said. "I am not moved by
those people. I read a great deal, and I get my
information from all kinds of publications, some of
which are published in Europe. I don't just cling to
the opinion of the American media, because it's not an
objective opinion. It's a corporate opinion, as you
well know.
"I'm very disturbed by the recent FCC ruling about
ownership. I fought hard against it. So have my
colleagues. And I'm very concerned that radio stations
and newspapers and television networks are being
concentrated into the hands of a few very large
multinational corporations.
"And we are losing diversity of opinion in this
country. We are losing the diversity of voices that
speak out."
So, if some of the Eagles' songs are informed with
Henley's social and political opinions, he's only
practicing his First Amendment rights, as he sees it,
and following the time-honored tradition of folk
music, which he calls "one of the building blocks of
rock 'n' roll."
But Henley doesn't want "Hole in the World" heard as a
controversial song. He calls it a hybrid of soul,
rhythm 'n' blues and gospel styles that happens to
carry a plea for peace and reason.
"The 'I'll kick your a--' songs are what's popular
right now, so we're kind of swimming against the tide
with this song. If we'd been thinking a little bit
harder, we would've gotten it out sooner after 9/11,
but I think there were a lot of people who exploited
that tragedy, and I certainly didn't want to be on
that bandwagon. There's more than enough of that going
on, so we waited.
"But the song can certainly be applicable to other
situations. There's still a lot of holes in the world,
metaphorically speaking. Almost 50 people have been
killed since the president said the war was over, so
there are still people suffering loss and tragedy, and
I think the song has some meaning for those people."
There will no doubt be other songs bearing weighty
content on the still-unfinished album, but the Eagles
haven't lost touch with the lighter side of life
altogether, Henley asserted. With all four members
contributing tunes, "there's a variety of things."
"'Hole in the World' is really the only thing that's
finished. Everything else is in various stages of
completion, so I don't know what's going to end up on
the album and what's gonna be thrown out.
"But there's some humor on the album; there's some
social commentary; there's some love songs. You know,
you've always gotta have songs about boys and girls,
just to get your foot in the door, to get everybody's
attention."
And in the course of the Eagles' three-hour show
Sunday night, during which, Henley says, "We're gonna
play just about everything we know," there are bound
to be moments of peaceful, easy feeling to balance out
with all the brooding.
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